Agile methods tend not to describe concrete, tangible practices, but rather principles, attitudes, and so forth. So, heated discussions about the rights/wrongs of agility can rage on for months, until both sides collapse in an exhausted heap with no sign of agreement.

DataCore has introduced two sub-£5000 disaster recovery and business continuity software packages for small and mid-sized businesses. They're based on the company's existing storage virtualisation software, and let you mirror data between two sets of storage via an IP network, even over long distances.

The newly Democrat controlled US Senate and Congress will soon vote on a law that would force the government to disclose all data mining programmes on US citizens. The bill requires all federal agencies to disclose their data analysis activities.

Brits planning a trip to the US will now have to surrender all 10 of their digits to the authorities for fingerprinting. The prints will then be added to the same FBI database which stores the prints of convicted criminals.

A mother of three died from water intoxication after a radio station drinking competition, a California coroner said on Saturday. Jennifer Strange, 28, competed in Sacramento station KDND 107.9's "Hold Your Wee for a Wii" contest to try to win Nintendo's console for her children.

Bulgaria looks set to become a mecca for EU citizens looking to pump up their airbags without surgery following the lifting of customs duty on Boza beer - reputed to have magical breast-boosting properties.

A week before Christmas, Diamant Art seemingly got a holiday bonus: On 18 December, the small Canadian maker of plastic food wrap saw its sub-penny stock price triple from 0.08 cents to a peak of 0.25 cents while trading in shares of the firm skyrocketed.

Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft sold, respectively, 604,200, 490,700 and 1.1m next-gen games consoles in the US in December 2006, retail market watcher NPD said last week. The company's figures show the Xbox 360 as the clear winner.

ReviewDriving data over mains power cables is nothing new, but products based on the latest, fastest incarnation of the HomePlug Ethernet-over-powerline standard have only recently started to appear, over a year after the specification was finalised, in August 2005. The new version of the standard delivers a claimed bandwidth of 200Mbps and is called HomePlug AV. The 'AV' is the clue to what it's for - this is the version of powerline networking designed for the HD era...

Toshiba has submitted a triple-layer, 51GB HD DVD-ROM disc to the standard's overseer in the hope the technology will be adopted as a standard by the end of the year. If approved, it allow the format to exceed the 50GB storage capacity of rival medium Blu-ray Disc.

Scientists have suggested that rare black "carbonado" diamonds - found only in Brazil and the Central African Republic - may have arrived on Earth aboard a kilometre-wide asteroid, New Scientist reports.

Two years ago, a small spacecraft fell through a turbulent atmosphere to land on the surface of an alien world a billion or so kilometres from Earth. Since then, the data collected during its relatively short descent has continued to delight and amaze space scientists, amateur astronomers, and anyone with a passing interest in alien worlds, so it seems churlish to let the anniversary pass unnoticed.

Starving North Koreans could soon be enjoying steaming platters of giant rabbit - thanks to German pensioner Karl Szmolinsky who recently sold 12 of the überbunnies to the nosh-strapped Communist state.

Be prepared to choke your beef and oyster pie of Olde England: previously-secret documents at the National Archive reveal how in 1956 the French Prime Minister travelled to London to propose a possible merger between the two countries.

We Yanks love to be scared. The more scared we can be, the better. The Effect of Bioterrorism Messages on Anxiety Levels, a recent article in a peer-reviewed health quarterly, put a point to it. Those covering the science of terror beat in the United States have known for a bit that the mainstream media's uncritical transmission of expert hectoring on doom has had the proper effect.

The PCI SIG, overseer of the PCI Express add-in card standard, has finalised version 2.0 of the base specification. The new released doubles the signalling rate from 2.5Gbps to 5Gbps. The upshot: a x16 connector can transfer data at up to around 16GBps.

In an earlier tutorial we discussed Ruby on Rails. Ajax is an XMLHttpRequest-based web technique that you can use to transfer data between a client application and a web server, and which lets you update sections of the web page without reloading it.